Distant Songs

The poet Teresa León was born in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso in 1940. She migrated to Canada in 1975, and has lived in Toronto since 1983. After years of writing poetry, her new form of artistic expression is painting and drawing. She is also the proud mother of seven and grandmother of fifteen, and a founding member of Creando Puentes, an organization dedicated to promoting the interests of Hispanic women in Toronto. The above poem originally appeared in her published collection, Poesía Errante, and appears here with the permission of her daughter Irma Paredes.

Distant seagull’s songs,
Sad songs rain’s augury,
Dense fog strong like my
Very own mind.
Deep pain nostalgic yearning,
Sound of the porteño* bullock,
That quiets my distant soul.
It is the rain that comes to wash
The pain

It is the freshness that it leaves, it is
To be born again

It is to feel the cold that pierces your bones
But it is life itself that
Is born again

It is only my mind, my soul,
Because my body does not feel you,
It doesn’t get wet, it doesn’t seep through.
It is an old and listless body
That does not want to live
But my porteño soul sings to it,
Rocks it, lulls it to sleep
And tells it, give me your hand,
Sing, give me your hand
and we will jump from step
To step
From hill to hill
Between teenager’s screams,
We’ll gamble the downhill
as we look at the window
Of my life
With strange landscapes
Where there are no screams.

Translated by Irma Paredes and Martin Boyd